Opinion | Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators | Megan McArdle | The Washington Post, January 17, 2023

"...In November, people who were disgusted with Musk’s new moderation policies — or just worried that Twitter would stop working after a 75 percent reduction in employee head count — migrated to Mastodon, driving its user total from 300,000 in October to 2.5 million.

This was a spectacular growth rate until it stopped. By early this month, active users had fallen by more than half a million, the Guardian reported. Possibly, this was simply a temporary hiccup, but I doubt it, because the nature of the attention economy makes it hard to create a major social media network that is like an existing network, only a little bit different...."